Descriptive Transcript
piano chords // The OHTN media logo drifts onto screen.
On-screen text reads: In November, 2014 over 200 researchers, students, community members and service providers met in Toronto for Back to Basic, a conference focused on helping basic scientists and clinical researchers communicate their work to a wide range of audiences.
From this point forward, the video cuts between clips of Back to Basic attendees and presenters during various sessions and interviews filmed at the conference. Together, the clips tell a story. Energetic music plays in the background, gradually building in volume and tempo.
Unless otherwise noted, speakers appear alone on the Back to Basic stage.
Sean Rourke: So, welcome everyone.
Billy Huang: The battle against HIV is not yet over.
Alexander Falkenhagen: We do not have a vaccine or a cure as of yet.
Nischal Ranganath: HAART itself represents the treatment and not a cure for HIV infection.
Jon Cohen: The key affected populations are marginalized populations. In my blunt language, are the hated populations.
A title card reading “science” fills the screen.
Stephanie Burke: I’m a Masters student at the University of Ottawa working for the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute on co-infection HIV and HCV.
Mary-Anne Doyle: So, we did a systematic review to look at the effect of insulin sensitizers on treatment outcomes, and liver-related outcomes, and to assess the safety of these medications in this population.
Alan Cochrane: HIV is an assault on the cell. But the cell is not an easy target. And I would like to use a comparison of the cell as a medieval castle.
Eric Arts: We have an arsenal of probably about 28 antiretroviral drugs, but, unfortunately, very little is being done, now, in discovery of new drugs.
Rupert Kaul: More often, it’s things that go along with the virus that are causing illness and our patients with HIV.
Brad Jones: You’ve heard a bit about this “shock and kill,” “kick and kill,” I kind of prefer this “flush and kill.” It’s a little bit less violent.
Mario Ostrowski: So, HIV actually likes it when the immune system is turned on by danger.
Charu Kaushic: So, I just wanted to bring everything together in one slide.
Jon Cohen: This is a beautiful slide.
The music stops abruptly as the video cuts to Rupert Kaul’s presentation, in which he discovers that his slides are no longer on screen.
Rupert Kaul: Somebody’s taken away my slide! I guess it’s like playing the music when you’re up at the — when you’re up at the Oscars. So — oh, no, its back! It’s back!
The music resumes; everything’s back on track, now.
James Lavery: The stories almost always tend to run ahead of the science or the tools.
Eric Arts: We make mistakes in treatment and, if anything we’ve learned from our mistakes, it’s that we can repeat those mistakes perfectly the next time.
James Lavery: Oh my God. I can’t believe how much is going on beneath our current levels of — our thresholds of detection. You know, that there’s an entire other world happening under there, and it looks like it may not yield so readily to all of our available tools and thinking.
Polly Matzinger: It turns out that, if you take that one more step with me, you fall off a cliff. And you stand in a different place. And you look at the immune system from a different point of view.
Alexander Falkenhagen: What if we can give our immune system the proper tool to fight off HIV?
Charu Kaushic: And how does being a man or woman make a difference between how your risks are, what your susceptibility is, what your treatment is? And it’s, you know, it’s completely different. So, it’s not a little bit different. It’s completely different.
Brad Jones: This is kind of my perspective as a basic scientist who’s managed to get out of the lab for a day.
A title card reading “communication” fills the screen.
Wangari Tharao: My first question is what is your relationship with the communities you’re actually hoping to do research with? You just don’t appear from the blue and ask people, “Can you participate in this research project?” So, you have to do that developmental work of engaging and letting people know what you do.
James Lavery sits in conversation with Darien Taylor.
James Lavery: We tend to be afraid of confrontation. We don’t like upsetting people. We want everything to be nice and calm. But, when you have major power differences, and when you have really fundamental problems in justice, you know, we can’t be silent. And I think, often, people don’t know how to not be silent.
Ron Rosenes: We are not a pool of cheap labor. There, I said it. We’re not a pool of cheap labor.
Jon Cohen: Too few places seek and embrace criticism.
Polly Matzinger: We scientists have our own failings, right? If something doesn’t fit into your model, you ignore it.
James Lavery: Scientists and participants don’t start with shared interests in the trials. Those have to be discovered and nurtured.
Jon Cohen: And there was a Supreme Court justice from South Africa, an HIV-infected gay man, who judged the world. Who stood in front of the audience and said, “This is like Nazi Germany. This is like apartheid. This has to end. And, lo and behold, to the astonishment, I think, of everyone, it did change the funding stream.
James Lavery: It is this notion of scientists and the community in a relationship that I think, for me, is the real foundation to build on, in terms of improving science communication.
Darien Taylor: And I actually wonder, coming to this conference, if we’ve lost ground since those bad old days in our ability — in our, even, our sense that we need to communicate about issues of science and research.
On a title card, the words “science” and “communication” fly in from opposite sides of the screen, forming the title “science communication.”
Polly Matzinger: I’m going to take you through 65 years of immunological theory in one diagram.
James Lavery: I grew up in my training in HIV and AIDS, and I don’t think I’ve ever been in a community where there’s a greater level of knowledge and understanding than there is in HIV and AIDS.
Lena Serghides: So, for me, the community is a central part of my work. It’s motivated my research. It’s motivated the questions that I ask. It enables my research because of the samples and the women that agreed to participate in the study, and it motivates me by looking at the enthusiasm by which my research is received from the community.
Sean Rourke: A meeting where non-scientists actually outnumber scientists two-to-three-to one.
Darien Taylor sits in conversation with Andre Cerento.
Andre Cerento and Darient Taylor: So, we are a majority. Yay! [they laugh and high-five]
Connie Kim: As a student who spent 16 hours a day in a lab sometimes, doing all these research experiments, it was very nice to see community members really interested, and engaging, and trying to understand more, and asking very important questions
Darien Taylor sits in conversation with Jon Cohen.
Darien Taylor: And I feel very strongly that there’s a tremendous sense of community and, you know, I like to believe that there is a kind of altruism. A sense of, you know, the mission isn’t really completed until we end AIDS.
Ron Rosenes: Because it isn’t just about us, and it isn’t just about them, and it’s about the ways in which we meet researchers halfway.
James Lavery: It’s not an issue about individuals. It’s really a, kind of, systemic issue. It’s a cultural issue, in science.
Brad Jones: We really want to hear from the community. From the people who are going to benefit from these cures.
Polly Matzinger sits in conversation with Darien Taylor.
Polly Matzinger: And that’s one way ideas come up. When you disagree with someone, and you respect that disagreement, and you really start arguing about it, without getting personal, you could come up with all kinds of wonderful things.
Charu Kaushic and Mario Ostrowski stand together, offering opening remarks on the first day of Back to Basic.
Charu Kaushic: This conference is a proof of how much hunger there is out there to understand what’s going on in basic science. And people want to understand this. So, I am delighted that we are — the basic scientists are outnumbered two-to-three-to-one, because it’s very important for us to understand what is it that community wants, and to basically shape our science based on your feedback.
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